[Slackbuilds-users] txz?

[B. Watson]

On Mon, 5 Oct 2026, David Chmelik wrote:

> When it's Slackware v16, SBo could maybe upgrade to txz by default, right?

You can make this the default already on your own Slackware box
by putting "export PKGTYPE=txz" in the environment (like, in
/root/.bashrc or such).

> It's been Slackware standard for many years

Slackware packages are generally built once (by Pat) and downloaded
many times (by everyone else). So it makes sense for him to save a
slight bit of bandwidth by using XZ compression.

Built SBo packages are generally built on the system they're going to
be installed on, or anyway aren't distributed over the Internet. The
typical use case is to build the package (compressing it), then
*immediately* install it (aka uncompressing it). The amount of local
storage saved by using XZ might not outweigh the extra time spent on
the better-but-slower XZ compression and decompression.

My gut instinct is that using .txz by default isn't worth the extra
time spent in compression, but that's not science...

Hard numbers would be good. Maybe you (and me, and a few others) could
actually benchmark it on real-world systems we actually use, with SBo
packages of various sizes, and see what the results look like?

I did just time "gz -9" vs. "xz -9" for a 99MB font package, and
the results were that xz took almost 3x as long to compress it (16.7
sec vs. 6.5)... but the resulting compressed file was 3.2MB (the .gz
one was 55MB). That's a single data point, can't extrapolate from it
really.

Hopefully others weigh in with their own opinions. Anyone?